CHAPTER I. VARIATION UNDER DOMESTICATION.

4. BREEDS OF THE DOMESTIC PIGEON, THEIR DIFFERENCES AND ORIGIN.

Believing that it is always best to study some special group, I have, after
deliberation, taken up domestic pigeons. I have kept every breed which I
could purchase or obtain, and have been most kindly favoured with skins
from several quarters of the world, more especially by the Hon. W. Elliot
from India, and by the Hon. C. Murray from Persia. Many treatises in
different languages have been published on pigeons, and some of them are
very important, as being of considerable antiquity. I have associated with
several eminent fanciers, and have been permitted to join two of the London
Pigeon Clubs. The diversity of the breeds is something astonishing.
Compare the English carrier and the short-faced tumbler, and see the
wonderful difference in their beaks, entailing corresponding differences in
their skulls. The carrier, more especially the male bird, is also
remarkable from the wonderful development of the carunculated skin about
the head, and this is accompanied by greatly elongated eyelids, very large
external orifices to the nostrils, and a wide gape of mouth. The
short-faced tumbler has a beak in outline almost like that of a finch; and
the common tumbler has the singular inherited habit of flying at a great
height in a compact flock, and tumbling in the air head over heels. The
runt is a bird of great size, with long, massive beak and large feet; some
of the sub-breeds of runts have very long necks, others very long wings and
tails, others singularly short tails. The barb is allied to the carrier,
but, instead of a long beak, has a very short and broad one. The pouter
has a much elongated body, wings, and legs; and its enormously developed
crop, which it glories in inflating, may well excite astonishment and even
laughter. The turbit has a short and conical beak, with a line of reversed
feathers down the breast; and it has the habit of continually expanding,
slightly, the upper part of the oesophagus. The Jacobin has the feathers
so much reversed along the back of the neck that they form a hood, and it
has, proportionally to its size, elongated wing and tail feathers. The
trumpeter and laugher, as their names express, utter a very different coo
from the other breeds. The fantail has thirty or even forty tail-feathers,
instead of twelve or fourteen, the normal number in all the members of the
great pigeon family: these feathers are kept expanded and are carried so
erect that in good birds the head and tail touch: the oil-gland is quite
aborted. Several other less distinct breeds might be specified.